The healer was not beyond a bit of wounding

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SIR Harry "Bill" Gibbs, whose funeral was held on Tuesday, was
chief justice of the High Court at one of its most troubled
moments. This shy, modest, cautious and conservative man had to
navigate the court through a period of great procedural change plus
the heat of the Lionel Murphy crisis. He'd been dubbed "Harry the
Healer" because as the successor to Sir Garfield Barwick he'd also
had the job of trying to subdue the bitterness that characterised
the Barwick court, not least of which arose from the intercession
of the then chief justice in the sacking of the Whitlam
government.

Much later, Harry the Healer was not beyond a bit of wounding
himself and from retirement he launched quite an assault on the
Mason court.

The Gorton government put him on the High Court in 1970 to fill
the vacancy caused by Sir Frank Kitto's retirement. Almost
immediately there was a rapid turnover of judges with Justice
Windeyer retiring and Justices Owen, Walsh and Menzies dying.
Within six years Gibbs was the most senior justice next to Barwick
and it was only a matter of the Fraser government moving him up a
notch when Barwick retired in 1981.

It was one of the most exciting constitutional times in
Australia, not only as a consequence of the legislative activism of
the Whitlam government but in the Fraser years as well. For most of
this period of expansiveness in Commonwealth powers, Gibbs was in
the minority.

In the Rocla concrete pipes case, which enlarged the
corporations power - constitutionally a move from the ice age to
the concrete age - Gibbs was in the minority. In Koowarta's case,
with Justices Aickin and Wilson, he was in the minority on the
extent to which treaties to which the Commonwealth was a party
could be used as a way of overriding state laws. This led to the
outcome of the Tasmanian Dam case in 1983, where the court found
that the Commonwealth did have power to save the Franklin River
from a Tasmanian dam. Again Gibbs was in the minority.

Before that Gibbs had been a judge of the Queensland Supreme
Court, at the comparatively early age of 44.

His time as a Supreme Court judge was marked by his appointment
as royal commissioner in the National Hotel inquiry and later
chairman of an inquiry into the expansion of the Australian sugar
industry. Gibbs thought it should be expanded and possibly people
in charge adopted his recommendations too enthusiastically, because
now the industry is in a state of contraction.

The National Hotel royal commission showed Gibbs at his most
neat and constrained. Journalist Evan Whitton is the full bottle on
this chapter of Queensland's history and it is laid out in his book
Trial by Voodoo (Random House, 1994). The allegation was
that the National Hotel was the venue for all sorts of vice,
including a callgirl business being run with the encouragement of
senior police officers. Who would have imagined such a thing?

In a sense, this royal commission was the forerunner of the
Fitzgerald commission which used its powers and got a huge result.
Gibbs didn't get much of a result. He concluded there was no
callgirl service operating from the hotel and no police had
encouraged, condoned or sanctioned in any way the non-existent
practice of prostitution from the premises.

Even though the royal commission was not bound by the rules of
hearsay, Gibbs stuck to them, which meant quite a bit of evidence
was excluded.

Gibbs was a big wheel in the constitutional monarchy movement
and probably had to spend more than a usual amount of time with
David Flint.

Vale Sir Harry.

The present Chief Justice of the High Court, Murray Gleeson,
yesterday issued a tight four-paragraph statement which said Gibbs
was "committed to the rule of law and the integrity of the judicial
process". Wow!